This was a disappointment. Summed up: you need to be aware of local realities while maintaining a global perspective. Oooook. This was primarily focussed on product branding and marketing differences in various markets. Some interesting insights below but pretty general. I had an experience at Kinkos this week that showed the limits of design for a global audience BY a global corporation (FedEx owns Kinkos). We had to hand-write my phone number and address on Kinko’s online form because I didn’t have a zip code (required) and my phone number (dutch) was the wrong number of digits.
Here’s some raw notes for what they’re worth, but I think I was just the wrong audience for this one.

Perspectives on Designing for Global Audiences

Date: Sunday, March 11

Time: 02:00PM–03:00PM

Location: Ballroom F

One size does NOT
fit all, so now what? Global audiences differ in preferences, online
behavior and adoption oftechnology. What do you need to know to design
something that really fits for an audience that’s constantly changing
and so big you can never get your arms or mind completely around them?
How should your design process differ from only designing for your own
country? Does your design process need to change as your audience grows
into new regions? We’ll give you key information you need to know in
order to successfully design for the online masses around the globe.
Our discussion will explore the challenges of designing one experience
for global users versus designing specifically for regions.

Speaker(s):

• Annette Priest, User Experience Research Mgr, Dell
• Arif Hirani, Critical Mass
• Nishant Jain, CEO, Design For Use LLC
• Rhonda Grindstaff Sesek, Run Think Measure
• Matthew Walton, Pres & CEO, RED

ain: story of a guy in india using a Razr, spoke no english, just memorized series of keys.

Forcing a global standard on local partners tend to alienate local offices.

What goes wrong with branding on a global basis. Interenet making all companies global players. Need to incorparate local variations and audience references in design process at an earlier stage.

Example: Honda Civic is a luxury brand in India, a first car brand in the US. Requires different marketing.

OK, I´m paying less attention now because they are talking only about selling products.
Common branding colours: Ikea uses a blue and gold that are similar to the Swedish (?) flag.

Use CSS and flexible standards that allow for display on a range of devices.

If you are a Nike or a Coke you don´t have to change your brand, but you need to localize it. In India Coke has five additional drinks they don’t have in the US.

OK, Facilitator takes an interesting Devil Advocate position says the US is behind in designing for a global audience. Jain advises: You HAVE TO HIRE LOCALLY — don’t try anything else. Eurocentric and American-centric design simply doesn’t work in India.

HHirani: Hire locally, but ensure formal communication plans set up with regional affiliates. Not enough to understand that somebody in a local office has created a user interface “needed in the local environment” huge amount of communication has to happen.

Don’t just hire for interface, but for research and perspective as well.

Rhonda: Get regional contacts involved, discount usability is better than no usability research at all.
Japanese culture makes no distinction between being online on a mobile device vs a PC. What do you do as a designer to get around that problem, when this is a more advanced tech than we have here in the US.

Matthew: CSS based design, Flash apps that are coming out for multiple platforms. How do you want the user to interact with the brand and use that as the baseline.

Hirani: If you don’t have a globalization director on staff, get one. If you are on the smaller side, it becomes an exercise in active lisstening, discovery. Guerilla research, call centre data. Look how it differs. Metrics on websites, look at regional differences before you create a common template. Multivariant & A/B testing.

Jain: My formal design in UI was US based. The process here will not translate to, e.g. India. We were doing a project for HR internet management. Terrible usability design, worst interface I’d seen, looked like 94. Anything I do will be better. But it got a satisfaction rating of 82 percent. Nothing in the US gets 82 percent. But everybody wanted to praise the system: their manager had chosen it. They feared that if they give negative rating, they would have the app taken away and go back to manual forms. But because I grew up in India, I could detect what was going on and get under the metric.

If you are designing for a market in Africa, you should take your next vacation there. Nothing beats first person observation.

you should have a warroom. these are our five target countries, these are our five target markets.

In soem markets, rich media is considered worse than Spam. Take a low bandwidth approach that is quick and nimble.

Impact of your own culture on design. How does your own culture impact how you think about design?
Indian attitude to deadlines: In US Friday means firday. In India Friday = maybe tuesday next week. So we have managers giving deadlines five days in advance to get it on time.

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